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Hey, everybody, welcome to the podcast. Glad you're with me today. We are gonna talk about a strategy today, which I call anxiety curiosity, which is especially good for those moments when you've tried everything and nothing is working. Sometimes when you're having a lot of anxiety symptoms and you're trying all these different strategies that I've already taught you, and it's just not making a difference, it's because sometimes our anxiety is not really based in the present. Sometimes our brains are stuck in the past and we're not seeing the present accurately. Sometimes our brains are stuck in a childish view of our resources and our demands. Some kind of trauma or difficult experience from the past that is coloring our vision of the present. Kind of like when you have glasses on and you see everything through the lens of that past experience. What can you do when that happens, when you've tried everything and it's just not working well? You can try this technique called anxiety curiosity. Sometimes there's a part of you that needs to be heard by your conscious brain. I'm gonna talk you through a specific story from my life where I used this technique so you can kind of see how to apply it. But I just wanna start by saying that if your particular past experience is not buried too deeply, then you can probably do this by yourself, with me just kind of showing you how it's done, and you might be able to do it by yourself. If that doesn't work though, you may need some help from a coach. Of course, I offer myself. Or a therapist. I was able to do this on myself in this particular example that I'm gonna tell you, partly because I had already done quite a lot of therapy and my therapist had helped me to understand how to differentiate these different parts of myself and be able to understand that there is an inner child and there is an adult part of me, and be able to objectify that inner inner child in a way. But if you haven't had a lot of practice, it can be difficult to start unless you have someone helping you through and talking you through. So I'm just gonna start with that caveat. But I'm gonna teach you anyway how it's done. Because starting to think about it can already help. And as I said, if it's not buried too deeply, it can maybe even resolve it.

So I'm just gonna go back to something that we mentioned in our last episode. We had an episode about people pleasing. We talked about how there's this idea of there being different parts of you. This idea really comes from, I'm basing it on Richard Schwartz's concept. He has a lot of books out, a lot of podcasts. If you wanna look him up, I'll link him in in the show notes if you wanna learn more about his technique. But just to sum it up, he talks about how it's really helpful to understand your internal self as various selves, as an internal family. And we compared it to those movies Inside Out and Inside Out 2, where there's the girl Riley and she has those different characters inside of her. She has sadness, she has joy, she has anxiety, she has jealousy, she has anger. And they're each depicted as an individual sort of member of her internal family. It's similar to that idea, but there's one difference in Richard Schwartz's idea of the internal family. He talks about how we have different parts of ourselves. But there is one part that is kind of like the parent of the family. That is our conscious self, that is the part of our brain that is able to think about the other parts of us, the part of our brain that's able to think about our thoughts, that's able to think about our emotions. So this conscious part of us, you can maybe think of it as the parent who can oversee these other parts of us, our emotions, these internal parts that we have, and is able to understand what they need and how to care for them and, and understand what it is that tr they're trying to do, even when they're not successful at it, that's able to understand who needs what and who needs to be in charge at what moment. So Richard Schwartz calls this part of ourselves, the self with a capital S. Sometimes I like to call it your wise self. It's your conscious self. So he talks about how it's really helpful sometimes to have a conversation between your wise self and the part of you that is causing you problems. So if you have a really strong emotion coming up of anxiety and it's not responding to other strategies and techniques, sometimes it's a signal that there's something that really wants to be heard and understood, some part of you that wants to be heard and understood by your conscious brain. And sometimes it's a story about something that happened in your childhood that your conscious brain hasn't really heard and understood yet. We have a lot of sort of not super conscious experiences from our childhoods because when we were children, there's a, there's a part of our childhood where we're not verbal, and then we're just gradually becoming better and better able to express ourselves. And words are really what makes something conscious, right? It's something where we bring it into the conscious part of our brain. And so a lot of times childhood experience is, is not understood totally consciously, and it can sort of sit and fester in there and end up coloring our experience even as an adult unless we can hear it and understand it.

So Richard Schwartz talks about how a lot of times we just need to have this conversation between our wise self and this part of us, which is having some kind of a, an issue. And once that part of us is heard by the conscious self, then everything changes and the emotion sort of dissipates, and you're able to go back to managing yourself and not being overwhelmed by this powerful emotion that doesn't seem to respond to any strategy that you are aiming at It.

So I decided to use his technique on a particular issue that I was having with performance anxiety. So all of you know, I'm a pianist, so I end up having to do a lot of different performances. And there was a period where I was feeling kind of frustrated with my performance anxiety because it was interfering with my ability to play at my best. I could practice something on my own and get it to a level where I just felt really happy with it, really proud of it, that I had a lot to share, and then I would go on stage and I would feel stiff and restricted and uncreative, and I would end up rushing, playing faster than I should and making a lot of mistakes, and I just, I just was really frustrated with my inability to play at the level that I was preparing. And this particular issue wasn't responding to other things that I was trying, it was still coming out in the moment of when I went on stage. And so I decided to try this technique of Richard Swartz. I know this sounds weird to be sort of talking to yourself, but bear with me. Let me just illustrate how this technique of using your wise self to talk to an emotion can help you to separate from that emotion in a way, get some distance, and be able to see it objectively.

So what I did was I sat down and I asked myself, I asked my anxiety, what do things look like from your perspective? What is making you so anxious when you go on stage? What it is that you are so afraid of? And I had my pen and my notebook and I started to just write stream of consciousness about all of the images that came to my head after I asked those questions. It's interesting, certain very specific images sort of came up after I asked those questions to my performance anxiety. I started to remember different scenes from my childhood. One of the scenes that I remembered was different times when I felt a really small and a little bit lost in kind of a crowd of siblings. I grew up in a, in a kind of big family. There were six kids, and I wasn't the oldest or the youngest. I was in the middle. I was in number five. And I remember different times when I felt that it was a little bit hard to to be noticed or heard. And my parents were very loving and very attentive, but their attention was divided between six children. And so I remembered times when I felt like I kind of had a clamor for attention or I wasn't getting the amount of attention that I really wanted. The next images that came to me were memories of years when my mother would sit with me one-on-one at the piano and practice with me. She was my first piano teacher, and she would, I remembered how many hours she would spend teaching me and practicing with me. I remembered her taking me to lessons later when I started with a different teacher, taking me to competitions, taking me to performances. I remembered the amount of attention that she showed me by sewing beautiful, elaborate dresses for different concerts that I would play. I also started to have images of times when my grandparents would come and visit and just sit and listen to me practice and praise my playing. And I remembered special trips that they made to be present at performances, certain important performances that I had as a kid, and of different concert gifts that they gave me in preparation for those performance performances. And I remembered their praise of my talents to anybody who would listen. And so I started to write down all of these different images that came to me. And it's important when you're writing down images that these different parts bring up, these different internal family parts bring up that you recognize, that you unconscious parts, they don't necessarily speak in words, but they speak in symbols. And I had already understood at that point, from reading that I had done by Gabor Mate, who's done a lot of work on childhood trauma, he talks about how to a child, an attention from their parent is equivalent to the ability to survive because a child feels like attention is protection and connection and children are totally dependent on their parents. And so a child feels like in order to survive, they really need this precious resource of attention. And so when I started to look at these images that I had written down and describe, that had come up for me when I had asked these questions, I started to understand how the child version of me understood that playing the piano well and performing well was a really big resource for securing attention from my caregivers, from my parents, from my grandparents. And so my childish brain felt that playing well was equivalent to connection and protection and critical for my survival. My c childish brain understood that if I did not play in a way that impressed the people around me, that I would lose my claim on this attention that I was getting from my caregivers, and then I would be vulnerable in a way, existentially. And this, you know, even though this realization sounds silly from an adult perspective, you can understand how a child would see things this way, to the a dependent child who really does depend on their caregivers for their survival. This conclusion that, you know, I'm existentially threatened if I don't perform in a way that elucidates praise from the people around me. If, if I don't do that, I'm gonna die. Basically, that's what my childish brain thought. And once I was able to understand that that's the way my child, my inner child, saw performance, then I could with my wise self talk to my performance anxiety and explain to it that, "hey, you know what? You are not a child anymore. You're not dependent on other people for all of your needs. Your survival is not gonna be compromised if other people who watch you play are inattentive or not impressed. Your performance is not gonna determine whether or not you are worthy of these basic resources for survival." Richard Schwartz talks about how if once you have heard the message of an internal part, the feeling will change. And this really happened for me. Once I was able to understand that my child, inner child viewed things that way, then I could comfort it, I can objectify it, and this helps to diffuse it. It ends up not taking hold of me and I'm able to focus on what it is that I want to do in the performance and not get all tied up and make a bunch of mistakes that I haven't been making in the practice room, et cetera.

So children, You know, we end up seeing things a lot of times in a really inaccurate way. Of course, even as a child, I wasn't in danger of, of not surviving if people didn't like my piano playing. But, you know, children come to funny conclusions and that was one of the conclusions that I had come to. But I didn't know that that was one of my conclusions until I had this quote unquote conversation between my wise self and my performance anxiety, and I asked it questions directly and listened to the images that it brought up, saw the symbols in those images, and understood what it was that my inner child had been afraid of. And how to couch that childhood perspective within an adult perspective and comfort that part of me.
So can you see how this is more effective than making a war against your performance anxiety? Of course I've mentioned before that research shows that if we resist and we fight against our anxiety, it will only get worse. But if you can try and understand it, be curious about what message it might be trying to bring, sometimes it will have a message from your past and help you to understand how your present experience is being colored by an unconscious experience from the past and unconscious conclusion about your demands and resources from your childhood. And once you understand what those conclusions are, then your wise self, your conscious self now can put it into a more accurate perspective and diffuse the power of that anxiety.

So I just wanted to teach you about this particular technique because it's one that you sometimes have to use when nothing else is working. And as I said it, you can do it by yourself sometimes, but it can be really helpful to get started with a third party, with a coach, with a therapist to help you to learn how to see these parts of yourself that haven't been conscious up until now. They're buried sort of in your childhood brain. And to be able to bring them up so that your conscious adult self can absorb them and understand them and comfort them. So if you want some help, look me up and we can talk through some of these things.
But thanks for listening. We're gonna have our kindness narrative now. And remember how good this is for you. This is your, your gratitude vitamin for the week. And gratitude helps you change your default anxiety settings if you will do it regularly. And if you haven't shared yours yet, please consider doing that 'cause it'll help you so much and it'll help us.

Thanks for listening.

When my eldest child was about 12 years old, he did many things that boys that age do. He used what I called the gravity method of clothing care, leaving them all over the floor, teased his siblings mercilessly cheated when playing games with them and avoided home chores when possible. He was not a bad or disrespectful boy, but I was overly critical of him. About this same time, he became a member of a local Boy Scout troop. Of which one of our neighbors, a man named Charlie, was the unlikely leader. He was a friendly and decent man, but an unlikely scout leader because he had no discernible camping skills. Instead of setting an example of Hardy Outdoor Living, always drove his big comfortable recreational vehicle to camp outs and slept in it while all the boys made do with tents. I was not thrilled about scout activities because they gave my son an excuse to avoid the boring household chores I assigned him. However, Charlie had a different attitude toward my son than I had. He thought my son was amazing and depended on him to show the other boys how to tie knots, sharpen axes, and other woodland skills. Of course, Charlie liked and respected my son, who thought Charlie and scouting was great fun. To make a long story short, now my son has grown up, is internationally known in his profession , has a large family of his own, and is an amazingly committed father. His former Boy Scout leader Charlie passed away some time ago, and I've often reflected on what a huge role he played in helping my son develop what he needed and was not getting from his own father, a sense of his own worth. I learned something important from Charlie and will always be grateful to him for helping me raise my son with the appreciation he deserved and needed.